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Watch: How to get super clean images when shooting high ISO raw files

The ISO capabilities in DSLRs and mirrorless cameras today is pretty amazing. But it’s not perfect. You’re still going to see an increase in noise as you ramp up the ISO, even if it’s not quite as bad as it used to be. But we all love clean, noiseless images, don’t we? Along with the improvements in ISO performance, we’ve also seen big leaps in noise reduction technology. But many of them still aren’t perfect, often eliminating noise at the expense of detail.

For some images, you really do need to keep that detail and in this video from Scott Walker at Walks on the Wild Side, we learn three different methods of noise reduction. These methods include simple Lightroom Edits, Topaz Denoise AI and a pretty complex method that’s very involved but “fixes everything”. He also covers a “Pre-noise reduction” process you can do before you bring your photo into 3rd party software.

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This ultimate guide to frame rates takes you down a super geeky rabbit hole but you need to know this stuff

Taran Van Hemert, formerly a video editor at Linus Tech Tips, doesn’t post all that often on his YouTube channel. But when he does, you know it’s going to be something worth listening to. This time around, he’s talking about video frame rates. Specifically mixing video frame rates on your video editing timeline. With so many cameras out there all shooting different frame rates and nobody able to agree on the “best”, it’s become a bit of a problem.

This video is fairly short by Taran’s standards, coming in at only an hour and a half. Yes, I realise that’s not a short video by any stretch of the imagination, but when you consider that his Premiere Pro Editing tutorial is four hours and twenty minutes long, it’s not that bad at all, really.

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Amaze your friends: Make a pinhole camera out of an orange!

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Oranges can take photos! Well, actually, they can’t, but you can use an orange to take photos. In fact, you can use pretty much anything to make a pinhole camera, the concept is exactly the same. A camera is merely a light-proof box with a hole to control the light entering (the pinhole in this case).

This fun video posted to the sub-Reddit Be Amazed shows you exactly how to prepare and use an orange as a pinhole camera.

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How to shoot & edit your woodland photos to give them a glowy, dreamlike, painterly look

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The real world, especially the natural real world, is filled with wonderful sights for us to capture with our cameras. The problem is, our cameras rarely capture the world exactly as we see it and particularly not how we feel it to be. That’s where editing comes in. It’s why we have tools like Lightroom and Photoshop to help us get our images where we want them to be. In the case of woodlands, that often means a dreamy painterly style.

Woodlands, particularly, are well suited to this style. It brings out those magical and mystical vibes many of us feel when we think of woodlands and the idyllic images we see in our heads. In this video, Nigel Danson walks us through his editing process in Lightroom Classic to give his woodland photos that soft and dreamy painterly feel. But this isn’t just a basic 5-minute tutorial. It’s almost half an hour long going into a lot of detail on the whole process.

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No, you don’t need 5 strobes to take a great portrait. Create beautiful cinematic lighting with just one light

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Sometimes I watch movies or TV shows, and I miss important plot points because I’m trying to figure out how they did the lighting. I just find cinemagraphic lighting incredibly inspiring, and it’s always something I’d like to strive for in my stills photography. But looking at lighting diagrams, it always seems so complicated.

I love to use just one light when I can, so you can imagine my delight when I spotted this excellent video tutorial from Armando Ferreira. He walks us through 4 different cinematic lighting effects that use just one light.

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Green screen doesn’t suck, you just suck at green screen – Here’s why and how to fix it

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Shooting on a green screen has become far more common these days. Green screens are cheap and readily available. Most video editing software, not to mention live streaming software like OBS and hardware like the Yolobox Products, have native support for it built-in. But it’s still something that many people struggle with when it comes to video editing with bad keys, dodgy artifacts and other issues.

A lot of people blame the software tools for a bad key, but is it down to operator error? Well, yeah, it probably is. There are many factors in shooting good green screen footage, and in this video, the team at Syrp Lab go through the process and explain exactly what could be causing your green screen issues and how to resolve them.

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Use this simple Photoshop technique to transfer colors from one photo to another

Matching colors in Photoshop is fun, but getting the selections and the hue exactly right can also be frustrating. Thankfully, some newer Adobe Photoshop tools have made it easier than before. While there are several ways of transferring colors from one image to another, in this video, you’ll learn a simple one that takes around two minutes. Let Colin Smith of photoshopCAFE will show you how.

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Do we even need Photoshop anymore? This is how powerful the new masks are in Lightroom

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Adobe Lightroom seems to get more and more useful every year. The most recent updates have made this a formidable piece of software. It used to be that I did a few small global adjustments in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and then headed straight for Photoshop to do the majority of the retouching work.

These days, I feel that there is less demand for perfection in terms of skin and more demand for a realistic look. At least in the work that I’m doing here in Europe anyway. Less is definitely more. Of course, I will absolutely go in and dodge and burn to my heart’s content if the image needs it. However, as this excellent video by Anthony Morganti shows, the masks are now so powerful in Lightroom that you can do much of your editing without ever having to open up Photoshop. Let’s take a closer look.

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Are your RED Komodo REDVOLT BP or other batteries not charging? Here’s how to fix it

With everything becoming battery-powered these days and as many of them being produced as they are now, it’s inevitable that some will show up dead on arrival. It’s something Tyler Edwards has experienced with his REDVOLT BP batteries for his RED Komodo camera. You put them onto the camera, plug it in to charge and nothing. But Tyler believes he’s found a solution to fix his DOA batteries.

In this video, he walks us through his process, which basically involves disconnecting and reconnecting the batteries from the power source about 20-30 times until it just suddenly springs back into life and starts charging normally. It seems like a bit of a strange solution, but it appears to work. I think I have an idea why.

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Adding realistic grain to digital photos is a deeper rabbit hole than you think

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For months now I’ve been obsessed with emulating the film look into my digital photos. It all started with me exploring the panoramic aspect ratio of 65×24 and other wide aspect ratios and trying to understand what makes a photo cinematic. As part of this journey I’ve also started to research grain, how is it formed, and how it looks on different film stocks and, truth be told, I was not ready for how deep this rabbit hole is.

In order to recreate grain well in our digital photos we first have to understand what grain is. On film, the images are composed of grain. Be it silver halides or dye granules, they are organic shapes that are distributed unevenly in an emulsion and when exposed to light they create the image you finally see.

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